Government’s new equality panel to “focus on the gaps in society”

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Labour historically have tended to introduce mainstream inequality measures whose time has come and which re-addresses the balance of society as it evoloves. It could be argued that Labour is queitly, even conservatively reformist once beyond this point.
But this labour party is dogged by a terror of it’s past which has seen crippling paranoia and cautiousness of an extreme degree. It is bogged down by this inability to be really bold which is what the Brown period should have been about.

The tories are not politically socially reformist by nature, often sighting bizarrely the mantra that social intervention is not the business of governement. Tories are traditionally interested in emanciaption via personal wealth and Thatcher’s financial policies did transform society and did in many ways emancipate millions of people in terms of personal wealth.

But financial and therefore social inequality has been a hallmark ever since then, and we have really struggled in terms of finding a way or a will to address or understand an essentially new type of modern social growth, one where poverty is still created but no longer means abjection, starvation and death, but a trap in decaying environments on a small amount of money which keeps you just alive but excludes you from participation. This is why the Tories are evoking 19th C style uncharacteristic ‘Whig’ like references to the issue of poverty. However if you look at Tory policy it offers nothing but policies that will further exacibate and police poverty and continue to treat the poor as inherently a threat to the creation of wealth.
This is why it is such a tragedy that the Brown period has failed, after so many years of Labour in government, to move in and offer progressive reform regarding the issue of financial/social/geographical inequality, which beyond the inequality of minorities is the only other real form of inequality that exists. It is far too little, far too cautious, far too late.

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